!Section 8 Bar!

Theme Songs of the Day:

1. "Warriors", by Kymani Marley
2. "Remind Me", by Royksopp

I'M IN A MF'ING SHIPPING CONTAINER!!

Recycled doesn't have to mean shitty.

Section 8 Bar is hidden down a discreet ninja alley leading into Melbourne's Chinatown.  Made entirely from a pair of shipping containers, old shipping pallets, and a bunch of old boots, the open air bar is a grungy-sexy-chic watering hole that attracts businessmen, students, and dreadlocked bohemian types all at the same time.  

A tiny, decrepit parking lot between some of Melbourne's oldest brick buildings has been recaptured and transformed into a completely funk-tional gathering spot.  It's the kind of place that makes you feel all that much cooler just because you know about it.

Shipping pallets are stacked and bolted together to form a maze of wooden counter tops and benches with balinese style cushions.  A couple of 500 gallon drums make for very sturdy bartops, with upended packing crates making up your barstools.

There are heaters to keep you toasty in the colder months, but bring a jacket because the roof is great at letting in sunlight, not so great at keeping out the rain.  Still, there is something about sipping hot totties and warm mulled wine while your breath vaporizes to a house-dub-reggae soundtrack.  I'm sure the bar would be great in summer months, though I've never been in Melbourne to check it out around that time of year...

The Drinklist?  Any beer list that goes from Melbourne Bitter to Guinness to Budvar to Tiger -with a honey spiced ale from New Zealand for good measure - can't go wrong...  And a cocktail list that includes creations like Passage to India [gin, drambuie, earl grey tea, lemon and a splash of tonic], Your Mama's Cheesecake [vodka, liquor 43, lemon, sugar and cream], and Grand High Chai [vodka, grand manier, chai tea, mint, orange and lemon] is enough to keep you wonderfully distracted until closing time.

Resident DJ Rintrah spins a moody blend of reggae, trip-hop, dance, and reggae every Thursday night, often featuring special guests.  The weekly lineup of DJs and events is often varied, always dope ...and don't be surprised if you walk in on live graffiti, or a random bike dance-off.

If someone doesn't do a version of this back in Honolulu, I am going to bring a couple shipping containers when I come home and find a parking lot in Chinatown to open up shop in!

PARKING LOT

SECTION 8 BY NIGHT

TOASTY MON

BACK OF THE BAR

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Tasmania: Day 1 - Blister in the Sun

Theme Songs of the Day:

1. "Blister in the Sun", by The Violent Femmes
2. "American Music", by The Violent Femmes

Q: What do rock & roll legends do when they retire?

A: Open a tea-house in Hobart, Tasmania.

Hobart is a beautiful old port town of short and squat historic buildings built to keep out the cold southern winds. Perched upon the waterfront of the Derwent River, which empties into Storm Bay, the Tasman Sea, and the Southern Ocean, I have never made the one-hour flight down to explore this corner of the world despite ten years of living in Melbourne.

The sun us setting and the clouds look as though they are glowing from the inside as we pull into the city center in search of Chado: The Way of Tea... A couple of short paragraphs grazed over the in-flight magazine on Tiger Airlines alerted us to the place, run by Brian Ritchie, bassist for the Violent Femmes, and his lovely wife Varuni Kulasekara.

There is one page of food items on the menu, and pages upon pages of exotic names with descriptions of the exotic teas served up. Our servers are a two beautiful women from Japan and India, who gracefully invite us in to sit and enjoy a meal - even though we are the only two people in the place.

Tea sets line the walls and a bamboo flute plays softly in the background. Apparently, Brian often stops by the shop to play for customers - not folk-punk bass guitar but the shakuhachi, or bamboo flute - and we missed him today as he played for the lunchtime crowd...

Dinner is delicious: bento boxes, Violent Femmes-style - served by the band's groupies with flaming sake bombs and everyone's favorite riff from everyone's favorite Femmes anthem blasting as the food comes out... "and we go ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, like a Blister in the Sun........"

Welcome to Tasmania, wild cultural hub of the southern oceans! This is going to be a good trip...

OK, SO MAYBE I EXAGGERATED ABOUT THE GROUPIES.
AND THE FLAMING SAKE BOMBS.
AND THE BLARING MUSIC.
BUT GEEZ, THAT FOOD WAS DELICIOUS!



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Street Music

AUTUMN SUN ON MELBOURNE

Melbourne's streets thrum with music, art and life at all hours. It's one of the things I love about this city.

The other day, I walked with the crowd up the stairs from the train platform at Flinders St station, in the midst of a mystical musical landscape created by a busker sitting on his guitar amp caressing his strings. The guitar had a clean tone, and the sweetly haunting music cascaded down the steps and washed through the crowd.

As I neared the top of the steps, a voice like butter wove lyrics that were vaguely familiar....after a couple more steps the penny drops, and I marvel at his strangely sweet version of Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters". His music is like eating foie gras: it's oh-so-good, and it's oh-so fine... and you know there is a dark side to the pleasure you are indulging in the whole time.

I step onto the crosswalk and into the night, surreal now with his music fading into the background of moonlit city streetscapes.

It happened so quickly - the time it takes to walk up a flight of stairs, through the train station turnstyle, and to the sidewalk. I have the presence of mind to flip a $2 coin into his open guitar case, but not to stop and take a photo; though my guess is that would have diminished the surrealism of the experience. The moment, and the feelings he evoked in me, are etched into my memory banks of Melbourne.

Walking around the streets of Melbourne, this kind of experience can happen at any time, so rich is the tapestry of buskers... I have seen child prodigies on pianos, flautists, guitarists, quartets, preachers, acrobats, jugglers, beatboxers, comedians, and freaks... some talented, some you would pay to shut them up...

The other day I read an article in the newpaper about Rupert Guenther, a Melbourne street-busker who honed his unique style of improvising classical music on his violin for five years, eeking out a living by playing music for passers-by.

He attended a masterclass in February at the renowned Julliard School in New York being given by Dr David Dolan, a professor at Guildhall and the Menuhin School. Dr Dolan was so impressed with Rupert that he suggested he audition in the UK at Guildhall's Centre for Classical Improvisation and Creative Performance. Rupert took his advice, and is now on his way to becoming an internationally acclaimed artist and teacher, like many of his alumni at the prestigous school.

Sounds like a screenplay in the making... I just love the creativity that just oozes from the pores of this city!

NOT RUPERT GUENTHER

NOT RUPERT GUENTHER EITHER!


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melbourne by mobile - a photo/video tour

THEME SONGS FOR THE DAY:

Australia: by The Shins, from the album "Wincing The Night Away"
Nosebleed Section: by Hilltop Hoods, from the album "The Calling"


Note: for best effect, click on the image to enlarge... and enjoy!

OLDE IRISH SAYING:
"GUINNESS IS FOR STRENGTH"

ELIZABETH STREET TO FEDERATION SQUARE

INTRODUCING: AUSSIE HIP-HOP!



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break on through...

"WHAT A FRIENDLY LOOKING HOLE.
LET'S GO SEE WHAT LIVES INSIDE!"

Today I went to the other side. Literally. Physically. Metaphysically. Let me explain:

A couple months ago while visiting Olomana Gardens in the foothills of Waimanalo, I followed along with an impromptu group hike and found out about a hidden trail that follows the water flumes which wind through the mountains and provide all the irrigation water for the agriculture in the area. We came across a tunnel about 4" high that disappeared into an almost sheer face of mountainside and was told that if we were to go through it, we would come out to the Lost World on the other side...

WAIMANALO WATER FLUMES

Today I went back. Today I went through the black, and came out on the other side.

We peer into the entrance and can only see blackness 30-40 feet in. The cool water rushing around our ankles gurgles impassively, and my stomach twitches as my mind starts to paint macabre pictures of creatures that lurk in deep, dark places, and of pale gaping faces floating in the night.

FELLOW ADVENTURER AND SOUL-SEARCHER:
LUCIE VOELCKER, THE TRAVELING POET OF GERMANY
AT THE TUNNEL ENTRANCE

Adrenaline kicks in and I can feel the glint in my eye brightening. The Traveling Poet's gaze meets mine, and our glinting eyes smile in agreement that we are actually going to go in.

The 9-LED flashlight, a gift I received only the day before, can only light the way 20 feet ahead before being swallowed by the blackness. It is a strange feeling, knowing that there are tons and tons of dirt, rock, trees, and who knows what else pressing in all around you. It is perhaps an even stranger thing to knowingly descend into these dark places of the earth; once the mind starts chewing on the your fears, the chatter is difficult to stop:

• "What if the light goes out?"
• "What lives in here?"
• "Remember that creature in Star Wars that dragged Luke under the muck in the garbage compacter? I wonder if that thing lives here..."
• "Now I know how Gollum must have felt; no wonder he went insane...."
• "Don't drop the flashlight."
• "What lies ahead?"
• "What was that?!?"
  
• "I don't want to see any faces. Or dead bodies. I don't do dead bodies. Or floating apparitions. No floating apparitions please."
• "What if this doesn't come out on the other side?"
  
• "What was that that just brushed my ankle?!"
• "Don't drop the flashlight!!"
• "DO NOT. DROP. THE FLASHLIGHT."
  

And on and on and on and on.....

On and on we press, losing all sense of time and space, save for what the flashlight can show us for the next twenty feet, the next 30 seconds. The tunnel walls are cold and roughly hewn, and beads of water glisten on the walls like pearls in the gray sky.

The water seems to simply appear out of thin air. The ceiling bears down upon us, seeming to get lower and lower with each step...then it toys with me, opening up every now and then enough to let me stand up straight.

Thankfully, The Traveling Poet starts singing. It is haunting and surreal and macabre and beautiful and strangely comforting all at the same time...

THE SOUND OF PITCH BLACK -
FOR BEST EFFECT, VIEW FULLSCREEN

We pause for a moment and turn off the light. The cool water rushes around my ankles, like busy commuters rushing and gurgling to make their trains. The walls press in around me, and my unseeing eyes blink naievely, desperately groping for light.

There is no difference between keeping my eyes open or closed. Panic rises in my stomach, and I smile broadly to laugh silently and keep the fear at bay.

The screen of my mind and the screen of my retina are one and the same, both inky blank canvases awaiting inspiration and direction...

We press on, the rythym of our sloshing footsteps keeping pace with my quickening heartbeat. I force my mind to stay on the light at the end of the tunnel, though it does not come. On and on into the next 20 feet of darkness we slosh, the water no longer gurgling but relentlessly going the other way, passing silent judgment on the decision to walk against the flow.

My life has become a cliche, and I am loving every minute of it: fear mixed with wonder mixed with anticipation shaken in mountain spring water and pressed by a hundred million tons of sheer-faced mountain...

It is no longer my imagination, the ceiling is getting gradually lower and lower now. Up ahead at the edge of the flashlight, I can make out a different shape, and I cringe....it looks like the roof has caved in, and I don't want to think about the implications of that.

As we get closer, the tunnel turns almost 90 degrees to the left, and what I thought was a cave-in is actually an older tunnel that has since been sealed. The water seems to have quickened its pace and is much louder here, and the cave ceiling keep getting lower.

Now, we are duck-walking, arse-deep in the water, and I am wondering if we will keep going like this until we shrink down and down and down into the size of m&m candies, like Alice in Wonderland, on our way to smoke hookahs with giant existentially philosophic caterpillars...

Up ahead in the distance, I see a simmering light...

It's not the Hotel California, it's the Exit to the Tunnel...and I can breathe deeply again. My thighs are aching from duck-walking the last 100 feet, but it doesn't matter now, I can see the end.

The Travel Poet emerges first, fourty feet ahead of me, and when I finally emerge blinking in the sunlight, a whole new world ... the Lost World ... comes into focus...

We are Sam Neil and Laura Dern, we are the only two humans left on the planet, we are the first two human beings on the planet...we are Adam & Eve. The other side is lush, vibrant green, a living, breathing soundscape of nature...

THE SOUNDS OF NATURE

With newly refreshed eyes and ears, each sight, sound, smell, touch is heightened, and we explore this wilderness we have discovered with childlike wonder, taking our shoes off and squishing through the mud, running up the valley walls and whooping with joy.

As the nature-induced ecstasy fades, we bask in the afterglow and settle back down next to the Exit, out portal back into the world we just escaped. Not ready to return yet, we hunker into our packs and much on organic energy bars and vegan apple cakes given to us that morning by our genius rockclimbing/smoothie-making friend [Badass Harvard Laureate]...and the Traveling Poet strums Martin [her guitar], and bursts into song again...

She is taken by the moment, channeling words and chords and melodies that speak to the moment we are sharing... I sit at her feet and am 6 years old again, close my eyes and am lifted with her voice, swirling with the notes up through the trees... she tells me later that when this happens, it is as if her soul is speaking to her through her own music. I am witnessing a faerie singing her heartsong in the wilderness with my own eyes...

INSPIRATION - CLICK FOR YOUTUBE VIDEO

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...Today, I sat under a mountain, and in the complete absence of light, became a thought.

A bodiless, floating thought. As if the tunnel had collapsed, and my consciousness was ascending through the layers of rock and dirt through the mountain to gain a better view...and in that moment, I experienced peace.

Peace, knowing that if I had indeed died, that I had died while adventuring, doing exactly what I want to be doing - something I love... and absolutely living in the moment.

Peace, knowing that few humans had ever trod into the heart of this mountain...and fewer still had taken the time to stop, turn off their flashlights, and savor the experience.

Peace, melting into the walls of the tunnel, becoming one with the 'aina.

Peace, knowing that the world is what you think it is.

Peace, in communion with nature.

Peace, reconnecting with the source.

Peace.

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